Tag Archives: Paul Hales

I WAS IN JERUSALEM. It’s all coming back to me now. Not Jerusalem as in William Blake Jerusalem. Not Jerusalem as in Israel/Palestine. No.

Jerusalem in Rathbone Place, Fitzrovia. I arrived in a timely fashion only to find that because I was the only person from TG Daily there, I had to be formed into a team.

Luckily, Hill & Knowlton saw that I seemed to know the managing director of Intel UK – one Graham Palmer – and they shuffled me off to a table with five – or was it six – people that worked for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).

Last time this happened at an Intel Yule Quiz, there was me, Paul Hales and Martin Veitch and we came a very close second to the people from the Daily Mail – seemed to be dozens of them – a very competitive lot.

The good thing is all the BBC journalists are members of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ). We didn’t win. I don’t think. They were a fun lot though. Where’s Jill Franklin when you need her. ♣

TO THE CHARLOTTE STREET HOTEL, in Fitzrovia, to listen to what Intel had to say about its Xeon 5500 (Nehalem) launch and to customer testimonials.

I stayed at Myhotel Bloomsbury, next to a pub, and which used to be a cop shop. I bumped into Paul Hales and Sylvie Barak from Register Two, who were there, too.

Gathered in front of an assembly of British hackdom was Tom Kilroy, from Intel Stateside, who described the launch of the 5500 series as the most important launch since the Pentium Pro.

Ah! The Pentium Pro! I still somewhere have a keyring with a Pentium Pro and cache attached. Intel was forced, as I recall, to re-engineer this chip because there was a problem with the cache. Think someone from Compaq tipped me off on that, all those years ago.

This set me thinking quite a lot. Kilroy wheeled in people from the London Stock Exchange, from Thomson Reuters, and naturally its customers such as Dell and HP – curiously not Big Blue – gave their sales pitches too.

Kilroy was here (left)

And as I thought of the implications of what Kilroy said – I couldn’t help wondering, of course, about the Itanium, a question formed in my mind, from whence it came, no one knows.

After showing us various benchmarks, which appeared to suggest that this was the best microprocessor Intel had ever fabricated, we had to start wondering about the Alpha chip “good until 2025” – said Richard George when he worked for DEC, and the PA-RISC chip. Because Intel seemed to be suggesting that this truly was a “mission critical CPU”. Why else would Mark Reece from the London Stock Exchange be there, otherwise?

The Hidden Agenda

After Kilroy told us that this was part of the “tick tock” Captain Hook style Intel cadence, we Brithacks sat patiently, waiting for the Q&A which never seemed to come.

The master of ceremonies eventually allowed a brief Q&A and pointed at me, Mikus Interruptus, saying: “Tom, would you now like to answer Mike’s question about the Itanium?”

Unfortunately my mind had moved on by then and I thought that perhaps a better question was how the financial meltdown had affected Intel’s business.

Said Kilroy: “Certainly there’s been an impact on demand”. The MC said: “Mike, we’re in our quiet period right now.” Too late!

We finally got a chance to ask our question about whether “Nehalem” was a better chip than the Itanium, but phrased it whether it was a better chip than the PA-RISC chip – obviously with the Power 6 from IBM in mind. IBM was not, officially, represented at this gig.

Mr Kilroy said that the question didn’t really compute, because the Itanium offered stuff like RAS and you couldn’t compare a chip like the Nehalem with the Itanium.

Later, we had a chance to speak to a friend close to Hewlett Packard who told us it had told its customers last September the game was over for PA-RISC. But, we asked, it would have to support customers like the US government on both the PA-RISC chip and the DEC Alpha chip? Yes, he admitted, that was true. The customers had the latest roadmap.

Do not forget, of course, that Carly Fiorina and the then CEO of Compaq, Mike Capellas, transacted an agreement that meant that, er, er, all things federal about microprocessors – apart from IBM – would belong to HP.

We bumped into a guy called Hugh Jenkins, who now works for the Great Satan of Hardware (Dell Inc). He said that of course Dell still uses AMD microprocessors for some of its server business. Er, BT seems to be an Intel only place, as far as we could tell.

Funny old business this, isn’t it? Intel served bucks fizz (mimosa) at the end. We’d already made our excuses and exeunted stage left before that was served. ♦

WE’VE ONLY MISSED a few Bill Moores’ parties at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese in Fleet Street, and unfortunately we missed yesterday’s event, as we’re in Sunny Bengaluru, rather than the cold Chrismassy atmosphere in London Town.

So thanks to fiends for sending us links to the best and worst of British journalism, raw in tooth and flesh, with the entire set here. It is Daryl Wilcox hosted now – he was a fine journalist – we used to call him Dayrate Wilcox – but he has gone to the other side. I wasn’t invited. ◊

I FRY OUT of Ole Bengaluru tomorrow, via Singapore, to the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) which is being held next week at the Moscone, a beggar of a place.

It will be a long fright, but I am up against the challenge to end all challenges. I will be competing with three or possibly four hacks from the INQster to bring news from IDF to our global readership.

Goodness knows how many Rogister people will be there. That rag is now, thankfully, a very distant memory of 14 years ago. The INQ has whitewashed me out of existence. So has the Rogister. I don’t mind, ‘cos Wikipedia continues to tell its own version of history.

I sold my shares in the Reg back to an adsales geezer, flogged the INQster to VNU, and seem to have generated loads of jobs in the process. It was something of a coup hiring Paul Hales at the INQster to work for VNU again, we’re sure you will agree.

In America, I will be 11 and a half hours behind Ole Bengaluru. My loyal team of hacks in India will no doubt pick up the slack and deliver stories to the world that the INQster and the ROGster can only dream about, the little bunnies that they both are.

Lest you think I am in the slightest bit bitter about the Register and the INQUIRER, I’m not. Far from it. I am satisfied at a good job well done. And I am looking forward to challenging them both at IDF! ♥